One of the things that makes the new Tesla GPU different from most other 8-series NVIDIA graphics cards in use is that the Tesla card has no graphics output in the back. Tesla is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: to leverage the power of a GPU for supercomputing purposes.

The actual clock speed of the Tesla system has not been revealed, but NVIDIA has indicated that one of the reasons it does not come with a graphics port is that it can clock higher than with one.

Each Tesla card by itself attains 518 gigaflops. Two cards exceed 1 teraflop. And four cards, as used in the Tesla Server, achieve up to 2 teraflops of number-crunching prowess. It's quite a demonstration of muscles flexed in the desktop supercomputing arenas.